The Million Dollar Homepage was a big deal back then. I remember seeing it on the news a bunch. It likely got a ton of traffic and every website was trying to capitalize on the hype.

I used to work in the same group as the company in the top left, Cartridge Save. I think the million dollar home page got them quite a few clicks, but when confronted with all those ads it's hard to pick anything out even if it's prominent.

It’s not necessarily true that nobody would see your ad, part of the novelty was just mousing over little square to see what was there. This was also in the early days of the web when such things actually were novel.

I know exactly why. Back in the heyday of blogs, around 2010, I was SO fired up every day thinking today would be the day I'd strike it rich.

I placed a very small ad featuring my blog's URL in the back pages of The New Yorker: it cost $500 or so.

I figured you never know who might see it and visit.

For perspective: at peak popularity back then I got about 10,000 visitors/15,000 page views DAILY.

Nowadays I get an average of 500 page views daily.

What impact did the ad have?

None. Nada. Zero. Apart from making me $500 ($700 in today's $) poorer.

So this discussion started me thinking about trying again, a simple classified ad like the one I placed in 2010, with just my blog's URL. Perhaps adding a QR code so peeps could easily have a look at my site with their phones.

I checked to see how much such an ad would cost:

>A simple 1-inch black-and-white classified style ad costs $6,066.

Pass.

I was involved in one of the logos on the MHP. It's not a very interesting story, but I'll share it anyway!

Being permanently online, I saw MDH quite early on and when it began to get some initial press mentions, I figured it might go big. I hit up a friend/client of mine - Ben Neumann (RIP) - who was CEO of Globat, a hosting company. He was hugely into guerilla marketing techniques (like paying a guy to have their logo as a tattoo or sneaking a Saddam Hussein themed ad into a popular computer magazine - a story in itself) so this was totally up his street and he immediately bought the large space now marked "FREE HOSTING" in the top middle.

At the time, Globat used to pay quite juicy commissions to folks for hosting referrals (equivalent to about the whole first year of hosting fees) so even if he ended up with 50 signups from it, it would have broken even.

It's funny because when I went to check the page today it's the one that caught my eyes.

Very interesting! I definitely clicked on that logo when exploring the page

Because it was a major viral phenomenon back then and people liked to go look at it and see what they could find within.